Gov. Perry Learns The Wrong Lesson From Backlash Over Anti-Gay Ad

December 09, 2011 10:45 am ET —
Kate Conway

Although public opinion is rapidly swinging in favor of LGBT
rights, prominent conservatives cling to anti-gay sentiment and policy positions
with greater and greater tenacity. GOP presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry
(TX) went so far as to throw a gratuitous
reference to his opposition to the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) into a recent ad. Here's the key quote:

PERRY: I'm not ashamed to admit
that I'm a Christian. But you don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there's something wrong in this country
when gays can serve openly in the military, but our kids can't openly
celebrate Christmas or pray in school.

Perry's ad has over 2.7 million views on YouTube, but people
aren't reacting very positively. As of Friday morning, the ad had earned over
400,000 "dislikes," and only 9,896 "likes." Here's what that ratio looks like, courtesy of YouTube, with the
proportion of people who reacted favorably in green:

You might think this would clue Perry in to the idea that
attacking gay people doesn't pay. Yet it appears that the first lesson Perry
learned was of a different nature: According to the Houston Chronicle, Perry's newest ad has disabled
the "like" and "dislike" buttons.

Perry's
campaign team learned something from that national controversy.

On their latest ad, they've disabled the
"like" and "dislike" buttons that viewers can use to rate YouTube videos.

In
Perry's newest ad, the Texas governor is reining the hate down on President
Obama's universal health insurance legislation, taking down anyone remotely
related to federal mandates.

Perhaps Perry has picked up cues on how to tiptoe
around his homophobia more cautiously, but he hasn't abandoned his anti-gay
backbone. According to the New York Times, yesterday he stopped
short of saying that he would force the discharge of openly gay soldiers if
DADT were reinstated, but also didn't say he'd let them continue to serve: "I think you go
back and you have that conversation with the civilian leaders and the military
leaders on how you want to deal with them."

There's
little to indicate that Perry will take YouTube users' rejection of his ad to
heart, given that the ad was originally created over the objections of some of his top staff. The Huffington Post reported
that the anti-gay ad stirred controversy within his campaign, which contains
several people who "have worked to advance LGBT causes inside the GOP."